The most Bitcoin users are very careful about keeping their anonymity. In this work we investigate the use of disposable addresses, a very common method adopted by users to protect their identity and propose a method to recognize these addresses, We applied it on the first 180,000 blocks of the Bitcoin Blockchain. Results highlighted that a large part of Bitcoin transactions involves disposable...

Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable monetary fraud, especially via ransomware. In this paper, we present our comprehensive study on all recent ransomware and report the economic impact of such...

An innovative software technology known as Bitcoin has been in the news recently, though mostly for the wrong reasons. The financial press, as it typically does, aims to fuel speculative predictions on future market prices, and Bitcoin has captured the press’s attention largely because of an extremely rapid growth in the price of the scarce units of account that the Bitcoin technology creates. ...

The availability of data on digital traces is growing to unprecedented sizes, but inferring actionable knowledge from large-scale data is far from being trivial. This is especially important for computational finance, where digital traces of human behaviour offer a great potential to drive trading strategies. We contribute to this by providing a consistent approach that integrates various datas...

Digital currencies represent a new method for exchange and investment that differs strongly from any other fiat money seen throughout history. A digital currency makes it possible to perform all financial transactions without the intervention of a third party to act as an arbiter of verification; payments can be made between two people with degrees of anonymity, across continents, at any denomi...

Bitcoin is a digital currency which started circulating in 2009. It was the first form of virtual money to become relatively popular. Bitcoin is public in nature as it maintains a log of all transactions. These are verified by its users in a process called mining. The extent of computing power and energy needed to mine bitcoins is set to increase over time. The main advantages of Bitcoin in com...

The goal of the project is the evaluation of the Bitcoin mining process, through its simulation in TinyCoin, a simplified version of Bitcoin. In particular, it is required to consider one or more fraudolent versions of the mining process and to compare them with the standard mining process/between themselves. In TinyCoin, each user has a single address and the transactions are simplified with r...

This paper introduces a noncausal autoregressive process with Cauchy errors in application to the exchange rates of the Bitcoin electronic currency against the US Dollar. The dynamics of the daily Bitcoin/USD exchange rate series displays episodes of local trends, which can be modelled and interpreted as speculative bubbles. The bubbles may result from the speculative component in the on-line t...

Bitcoin exchanges are a vital component of the Bitcoin ecosystem. They are a gateway from the classical economy to the cryptocurrency economy, facilitating the exchange between fiat currency and bitcoins. However, exchanges are also single points of failure, operating outside the Bitcoin blockchain, requiring users to entrust them with their funds in order to operate. In this work we present a ...

BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which changing a transaction’s hash may result in the protocol disruption and a financial loss. The problem mostly concerns protocols, which use a ”refund” transacti...